Interview with Garth Maxwell

I recently had the joy of watching the 1993 New Zealand gothic horror film, Jack Be Nimble. Within the first few minutes, I felt a queer energy emanating from this tragic and deliciously campy film. Shortly after my viewing, I felt compelled to reach out to the director and co-writer, Garth Maxwell, who graciously agreed to do an interview.

Garth and I chatted about his experience as a gay film director in New Zealand during a period of rampant homophobia, including within the broadcasting industry. We also discussed what it was like working with the late Alexis Arquette, who starred in Garth’s first feature-length film, Jack Be Nimble. We also discussed his other work, including Beyond Gravity and his time as a director on Xena: Warrior Princess.

You can checkout Jack Be Nimble on Shudder.

Tell me more about yourself. How did you get involved in filmmaking? 

I had quite strict parents that were medical people and they were all about giving practical careers to provide a provider. I managed to slither out of that kind of position and I was given a 35 millimeter SLR camera  when I was about fifteen. That really got me interested in photography. I also had a little portable cassette player recorder. You push it and you just put it in a sense of what sound could be.

Eventually that led me to a career as an assistant editor in post-production and that was very useful for developing a sense of your tools as a director. You know, your tools are simply sound vision and there are many creative ways you can put that together. They don’t just have to be realistic. I was doing a lot of sound editing. This was after university where I received a degree in English literature, so I sort of had a basic understanding about what content was and how much story you needed to successfully retain an interest.

The editing room was a great place to hone my skills for about a decade. I left to become a filmmaker and I felt equipped. Igniting all of that was my homosexuality at a time when it was still not legal in New Zealand. I was also of that generation just coming through saying “here we go. We’re going to tell our stories.” So that was a kind of flame burning petrol. 

What inspired you to make Jack Be Nimble?

I had done a short film of one hour film that had been called Beyond Gravity, and it was a gay love story. It was very charming and quite emotional and quite romantic about a relationship between me, really, and an Italian boyfriend I had that I fictionalized. It had been quite successful. It ran for a month at a cinema in Auckland. It had won 50,000 Francs at a French festival. So quite a bit of money really. Funny thing was it was co-financed by the Commission here and there was an internal exec who blocked it. He said “no”. And uh, that was really a sign of how outdated the broadcasting industry was at that time. 

I was told that if it’s going to air, then I have to make all of these cuts. But I thought, “why am I going to make those cuts again?  I started sending letters to the CEO, but I got nowhere with him, so I made a storm of publicity. It was quite a bruising experience and I was angry.

At that time I was devising Jack Be Nimble as a response. We’d have the homosexual law reform bill finally passed in 1987 and it had been fucking ugly. And actually it was a really horrifying portrait of the population and their attitudes, even though it got through, had exposed what the country was and the intensity of their hate. And just generally fury at having been sidelined by the broadcasters. Well, I just “fuck you, We’re going to go ahead and and see how you like that.” 

Since it wasn’t a television project, it didn’t have to face any of the guff, you know, of how “palatable” it could be. This happened at a point where there were two younger producers with the support of two older producers in a development program and I just found a home for the project.

I’d love to go back to something you had said related to your short film and the experience that you had, you meant you said the word fury specifically and going back to Jack Be Nimble, especially with the ritual character,  Jack. The reason why this came up even to me as a queer film, was because he, to me,embodies gay rage. He’s somebody that’s incredibly angry, exacting revenge on people who tormented him, who abused him. And whether you’re looking at that as an actual queer character or not, I think he’s very much right as a queer character to me. I was just curious that that was intentional. And what of your experiences, if any, was brought to the character Jack?

I don’t think he was even formulated as a gay character. He kind of misplaces his attachment to people to his sister. There is a moment or two where they are on the brink of a sort of incestuous relationship but really it’s just because he’s been living more or less in an isolated way and he is driven to her as she is for him.

Alexis played the part of Jack. Alexis being Alexis instinctively understood what was going on and it helps that they were not a vanity actor that was there to create a palatable image of themself. They were there to pour gasoline on the material. They were stunning, fantastic. And I feel so lucky that we crossed paths when we did. 

Music was so much a part of the movie too. It was lush, orchestral swampy, and atonal. At other times it was like demented Victorian music box sort of outside of time. Chris Neal (composer) was an incredible partner in creating atmosphere and the film’s identity.

That leads to my next question for you. I would be remiss not to bring up Alexis Arquette. They were such an icon in terms of horror films and indie films. Sadly, they were taken us taken from us way too soon.  What was it like working with Alexis and or do you have any particular stories that come to mind?

I met Alexis when they burst out of a paper mache volcano at my friend Rich Glatzer’ club, Trade, in Hollywood. Rich was the filmmaker behind Still Alice and films like that. And he had a club called Trade and I got taken there by Yoram Mandel, who was a producer I’d met in Toronto. An amazing Israeli guy who’d done Grief, which had Alexis in it. And up came Alexis at the climax of the show, looking like a Hawaiian fertility goddess with the earrings and all that. They came over to the table and I asked, “do you want to come to New Zealand?” and Alexis was like, “I’m in!”

My problem had been that I had a very high profile Australian actor who was down to do it, and it had been actually focused on the script and realized for him it was too violent. And then Alexis just stepped in and did a really incredible audition in their car. They nailed the New Zealand accent, which is not an easy thing to do, you know. It was sort of a perverse reversal of the usual thing where some of the American shows get shot in New Zealand. Then I’ve been both like Xena:, Warrior Princess and things like that, where we’re all doing this terrible American accent.

So Alexis came down and was this very focused person in a hoodie, wandering around the carpark of the production office with headphones on while going through the dialog just to keep the accent. Alexis was really ready for it, but very focused. And that focus extended to the set. It just took a real elite as well as someone who had control over their energy and their emotion. They were very disciplined person. 

Thanks for sharing that. And yeah, I just, I do think that it would have been so great to see what else Alexis would have done in their career. One of my first introductions to them was in The Bride of Chucky. It’s such a camp classic movie, you know. Alexis had such a small role, but it’s one of the most memorable roles in that film. And I think that was just the impact tha Alexis had on all the films that they were in.

I brought Alexis back down to New Zealand. I was working a lot on Xena Warrior Princess and we were doing a Caligula episode. I was asked “who do you want? Which actor in the world would you want to come down?” and I said, “well, there’s only one. Get me Alexis.” 

That’s another show I watched a lot growing up. So now I’m going to have to rewatch it and look for that. Xena was an important show for a lot of gay folks here in the States. 

You know we kind of just snuck everything in that we possibly could get. 

And I’m really appreciative that you did it, too!

I think it was because we were on the outside of the system. You know, New Zealand was like Hollywood’s backlot. No one was watching. Even the scripts would come down from the States and we would just rewrite them overnight. They didn’t understand what we could do, but we knew what we could do.

You’ve got a lot of interesting different projects. I’m curious, do you have any current or upcoming projects that you’re working on that you’re able to share? 

I took a break from the whole business for a while. I was driving buses and doing all sorts of things.  I mean, I don’t really care. I was just trying to refresh everything for myself. Yeah. And now I’ve come back to the business. I’m working on a film that I’m writing, which is a bit too early for me to say anything about, but it’s still in the genre area. Yeah, and I’m just sort of my viewing pleasures at the moment are really in Japanese crime, things like that.

Which Japanese films? I’ll have to check some out. 

Well, these ones have just come down. I haven’t seen them yet, Graveyard of Honor and Police Tactics. It’s all quite dated, but I don’t care about that. I’m interested in how much story they carry.

I have one last question for you: what makes horror so inherently queer? 

I guess the experience of being a gay person in a straight world is that “you’re not us, you’re them”, right? So you always have got a secret. Whether it’s out or not, your secret is as powerful and, at times in your life, terrifying because it will advantage you, but often primarily disadvantage you for your secret to be exposed. And who can you trust with your secret? That is an aspect to the paranoid life of gay people. 

Where’s the best way to follow you to keep up to date on your projects?  

I quite like Instagram. I’ve just I’ve just started using it and I like it. It’s it’s fun. Yeah, on Facebook and on Instagram (_garth_maxwell_).